Use of recurrent neural networks considering maintenance to predict urban road performance in Beijing, China

A correct understanding of the pavement performance change law forms the premise of the scientific formulation of maintenance decisions. This paper aims to develop a predictive model taking into account the costs of different types of maintenance works that reflects the continuous true usage performance of the pavement. The model proposed in this study was trained on a dataset containing five-year maintenance work data on urban roads in Beijing with pavement performance indicators for the corresponding years. The same roads were matched and combined to obtain a set of sequences of pavement performance changes with the features of the current year; with the recurrent-neural-network-based long short-term memory (LSTM) network and gate recurrent unit (GRU) network, the prediction accuracy of highway pavement performance on the test set was significantly increased. The prediction result indicates that the generalization ability of the improved recurrent neural network model is satisfactory, with the R2 achieving 0.936, and of the two models the GRU model is more efficient, with an accuracy that reaches almost the same level as LSTM but with the training convergence time reduced to 25 s. This study demonstrates that data generated by the work of maintenance units can be used effectively in the prediction of pavement performance. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Artificial intelligence in failure analysis of transportation infrastructure and materials’.